About PizzaPlan - Christoph from Forstinning

PizzaPlan is built in Forstinning near Munich by Christoph, working alone. The calculations come from baking literature and are checked with experienced home bakers before they reach the app. It runs offline, without an account and without tracking, funded by a single one-off Pro purchase.

The person behind PizzaPlan

My name is Christoph, I live in Forstinning (Bavaria, Germany) and I have been baking pizza seriously since 2018. What started with Caprese turned, via Tipo 00 flour, a wood-fired oven and 72-hour cold ferments, into a weekend ritual.

At some point I got tired of pizza-dough “recipes” on the web that are basically guesswork: “a pinch of yeast”, “some water by feel”. For three pizzas that may still taste fine - for eight dough balls at a birthday party it turns into a lottery.

Why PizzaPlan exists

PizzaPlan does what a good pizzaiolo calculates in their head:

Baker’s percentages instead of eyeballing. Water, salt and yeast are calculated as a percentage of the flour - the way pizzaioli and bakers have done it for decades.
A yeast curve by fermentation time. At 4 hours room temperature you need around 6× as much yeast as at 72 hours in the fridge. That’s not an opinion, that’s math. PizzaPlan has the curve built in and calculates it for you.
17 flour types with real profiles. Tipo 00, Tipo 0, Tipo 1, Type 550, Manitoba, Spelt 630 and more - each flour gets its own hydration range.
Pre-ferments done right. Poolish (liquid, 1:1), Biga (firm pre-ferment) and Li.Co.Li. (liquid Lievito Madre) are fully computed in PizzaPlan Pro, including the remaining quantities in the main dough.

The result: You enter how many pizzas you want, which hydration and how much time you have - and the app tells you, down to the gram, how much flour, water, salt and yeast you need.

What PizzaPlan is not

Not a social network. Not a tracking monster. No pay-per-click ads. No fake star ratings. PizzaPlan calculates offline on your phone - no account, no photo upload.

How this is funded

The base version is free and stays free. It already includes four sweet yeast doughs (Germknödel, Dampfnudeln, Buchteln, Hefezopf). PizzaPlan Pro for €2.99 (one-time purchase, no subscription) unlocks six more (Krapfen, Cinnamon Rolls, Focaccia dolce, Brioche, Maritozzi, Butterzopf), plus pre-ferments (Poolish, Biga, Li.Co.Li.), the flour brand catalogue with 220 flours from 72 brands and additional pro features. That’s it. Affiliate links to pizza gear pay for the servers - whatever you buy through those links costs you nothing extra.

What I personally use

Flour: Caputo Pizzeria, Le 5 Stagioni Napoletana, occasionally Petra 5063.
Yeast: Fresh yeast from the supermarket (often surprisingly good); active dry yeast for long cold ferments.
Oven: An Effeuno P134H pizza oven for 450°C+, plus a regular home oven with a baking stone for Romana and pan pizza.
Tools: Wooden peel to launch, perforated metal peel to turn and pull, infrared thermometer for stone temperature.

What I would recommend today is on the accessories page - with honest notes on what works for what.

How the numbers in the app come about

Every number in PizzaPlan has a source. The yeast quantities for cold fermentation follow Jeffrey Hamelman’s formula, room-temperature fermentation follows the prediction table by TXCraig1 from the pizzamaking.com forum. The sweet dough values come from baking textbooks, among them Loderbauer and material from the Richemont trade school. Flour profiles come exclusively from manufacturer data sheets; retailer claims and estimated W values from comparison sites do not go in.

Before a recipe value reaches the app it passes three stages. First the source: is there evidence, or is it a rule of thumb from the internet? Second the counter-check: does the app calculate the same as the reference with that value, across all quantities and fermentation times? More than 1400 automated tests run on every change for exactly this. Third, feedback from experienced home bakers who send me results, photos and spreadsheets.

When a value turns out to be wrong it gets corrected, and the correction is documented instead of quietly disappearing. Most recently that hit the hydration ranges of four dough types, where the app offered values that never reached the result, and a W value calculated as a range around the manufacturer’s figure although the data sheet only allowed an upward deviation.

What cannot be substantiated does not go into the app. Better to leave a question open and ask someone who knows than to invent a number that merely sounds plausible.

Contact

Direct line: info@pizzaplan.app. I usually reply within 24 hours. Full postal address in the imprint.

PizzaPlan is my project - no company, no marketing team behind it. If something is missing or broken, drop me a line.